The Caged Bird Sings
by shelleyrusalki
Summary: A teeny-tiny trip down memory lane with Bellatrix Lestrange and her beautifully deranged mind... my first proper writing here :3


**A teeny-tiny quick trip down memory lane with Bellatrix Lestrange...**

**I have read over the past few days, and with much greed, the story by KuraiBites 'These Gilded Chains We Wear' [ s/7755315/1/Those-Gilded-Chains-We-Wear].. so I guess, it being still fresh in my mind, this might have a couple of influences from that story... it's such a good fanfic that I now almost have it cemented it in my head as TRUE Bella-history! GO READ GO READ! :3**

**This is pretty much safe for everyone... some 'adult' themes and /or some hints at more 'adult' themes... otherwise it's pretty friendly. You are most welcome to interpret anything you wish from this! :)**

'Is there no way out of the mind?' **~ Sylvia Plath**

'Like a diamond in the rough, they would take me away to my new life, my new world, where everything would be different. Yeah, I lived that way for a long time... in my head... dreaming like that... it was nice... And then one day it just stopped.'** ~ Charlize Theron as Aileen Wuornos in 'Monster' (movie)**

I went THERE again, in my head, today.

To that blackened lake, near that castle. Where you could always hear the gentle wind weaving through the trees, where you could hear each autumn leaf drop to the floor, for there were no birds near that forest. Their music wasn't missed by me, I strangely _hated_ it. I loved, instead, to hear the bees buzzing and courting the pretty flowers which were always fanned out in various multi-colour. You couldn't hear the details with too many birds in flight and song. The crickets scratching their legs in the tall grasses, magical flowers snapping shut with touch, the insects skating on the surface of the inky waters.

I remember, always, the excitement of running up to the lake before jumping in, throwing my horrible school robes to the floor, and hearing them suck into the mud after I stamped on them. I never cared if they got dirty. If I got dirty. A quick spell would clean them, or I, but I never usually bothered unless it was scornfully requested of me. There was too much to experience to bother about something as mundane as cleaning!

I climbed the trees, I knew the species of each and every one, but I'd personally named as many as I could see, humming to them and playing in their arms on most days. I often searched for the bugs and animals living inside them, watching with envy as they relished their tiny comforts. Then climbing down, sometimes ripping my skin on the way, but always glad to be offering the tree any nutrients from my body, my soul, for holding me in my times of escape.

Whenever the moon circled, the tides crashed, and I was menstruating; I would always store it all and give it back, to the plants and the flowers, to nourish them. The foxes would eat the rabbits, the frogs would eat the insects, the birds would eat the worms. I felt a little left out that I was not truly a part of this world either. I was almost irrelevant, a spectator, as nothing would naturally eat me to sustain itself.. and, at the time, I outright refused to eat meat, or eat or wear anything derived from an animal. To give something small back to this place which felt like a peaceful place in my mind, it helped me express my feminine love for it all, to feel a part of it, and of Mother Nature herself.

To the disappointment of others, I always looked a bit of a mess, as I loved all places, and I was for them. I wasn't got, and I didn't get people, but I always loved to explore and play; even if it was usually in total solitude. I was often dusting off dried mud, plucking frogspawn from my unruly hair, biting the scabs from my knees, and licking the grazes on my elbows.

It was never understood by others just how a lady from the most noble and ancient house of Black could have been so... _feral_. I guess the beauty they saw and claimed of me might have made up for how boisterous I could be... but I never really saw what they saw, as I never thought that it was _me_ that they saw. My skin and body where just forms to encapsulate my soul, albeit against its will, I often decorated myself to help it leak out.. but I would never be able to fly away like a bird could, and feel the breeze beneath my wings, and go to wherever I wanted to because I was part of something much wider.

The forest, the lake, solidarity, and nature itself was always my refuge. Away from home, my irrelevant life, and away from the world. At school, I kept my nose in books, desperate to expand my mind and fill it with as much as I could. When I wasn't learning, I was always daydreaming, and I still do, a skilled art that I've kept very much alive since childhood. I could remove myself from most situations easily and be totally elsewhere, if I needed to be. Even if I only wished to be, out of boredom. We are only learning for such a small period of our lives, and I wanted to run with it and equip myself with all I could for when the time came for me to leave, when my haven was then gone forever, for my mind had to be the strongest muscle I owned.

I was never a loner, I had my friends I believe, but I just couldn't relate to others well, and I never did seem to be able to learn the tools to function well in social situations. I often found myself at a loss for words in conversation, unable to speak to others, getting frustrated in my own way, or just saying so much in one go that no-one else could make sense of me. I had a very misplaced interest in most general day-to-day conversation. It bored me. No books can teach and rectify that. Books will only make you over analyse that stuff even more... I always knew how I SHOULD be, how my thinking was and how I could make it better, but it never came naturally. I almost never wanted it to.

I felt too much to function sometimes, and I always found that language was restrictive, no matter how flamboyant it could be. I could only love wordless music that painted on my silence. The music of the nature around me, especially in that place. I loved to draw and paint, but only in very abstract manners.. I remember being scolded by teachers so many times in these 'expressive' lessons, as they weren't quite what THEY wanted, or meant what THEY had been taught them to mean. Even pictures are still restrictive, for we do not only see with our eyes. Some of the fainter scars on my body were from those days, and they are my better ones. I do not look at those with fear but with comfort, unlike some of my more recent ones.

I guess my need for a good expressive outlet is why I tried to learn the languages of other countries, but humans - in general - have always been too restricted, so oppressed, so full of nothingness. There are, for example, only ever so many different words for love, for hate, and other emotions, in human language. Although fluent in a multiple different human languages, I was spurred to learn the languages of magical creatures. The most beautiful language of Merfolk in the lakes, of Centaurs in the forests, Thestrals in the glades, Rusalki and Asrai in the rivers, of Faeries in the fungi, and many others.. and much later, the rather expressive language of snakes.

Of course, my years in Azkaban were tough for a mind so free as mine. My daydreaming skills were only perfected there, and it kept me from going over the edge. I did not have many happy memories, and the few that I did have were only of a slight content, already my escapes, such as my refuge at Hogwarts, and I had to hide them and force my mind into my darkest despairs for them not to be sucked away and lost forever. You cannot imagine the days, the months, the years, how little there was to stimulate me except for the darkness and the screams, and how well my mind had to cage itself from my exterior prison, from the Dementors. It took a massive toll, despite my natural state always being quite melancholy, as before I had only ever thought of the better memories to hide my despondency, doing it the other way around made my soul leak into the deepest recesses of my mind which most never falter to. Accessing such places wore holes in my skull, but if one can go so far down on that spectrum, then I had always held the hope that I was training the other end of the spectrum - and readying myself to be able to experience a new heightened level of happiness, perhaps which normal people feel as their natural state, once I was freed by Him. I hoped to be in awe at absolutely everything again, as I was when I was a very young child. I had not expected that it would become so twisted, for I was just trying to survive my time there, and thus, the birth of my mania once my escape came to me. I had always felt in extremes, but I had never felt so alive as the day the walls of Azkaban fell down at my lacerated feet... the laughter falling from my mouth like a foetus I had desperately needed to birth many years before.

I did hear birds then, flying over the oceans, singing their music over the waves, and, now with my wand in my hand, I shot a curse at one and it landed before me. I wrung it's neck for finality, whispered a 'Thank you', and removed its head. I pulled the rotting string from my head, which had held together my raven hair so messily for so many years, and fashioned myself a crude necklace from the skull. We always wish to be as free as birds, but nothing is ever free.


End file.
